Literary Criticism - Caribbean & Latin American

"Any attempt to reckon with Cuba's torturous twentieth century will have to take into account Arenas's monumental work ... an essential human testimony, joyful and enraged, a triumph of conscience." -- Garth Greenwell The acclaimed memoir of queer Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas chronicling his...

Poems and micro-essays intertwine in this poetically attuned adaptation of the mid-sixteenth century Nahuatl-language Cantares MexicanosCantares is a multipart engagement with the poetics and history of the colonial and Indigenous Americas, oscillating between poetry and essay in a structure of repetitions derived from Mesoamerican...

A New York Times Notable BookA Miami Herald Best Book of the Year A moving and deeply personal account of art and exile from Edwidge Danticat, winner of two National Book Critics Circle Awards--now with a new preface by the author "Create dangerously, for...

Ostensibly a biography of the gaucho barbarian Juan Facundo Quiroga, Facundo is also a complex, passionate work of history, sociology, and political commentary, and Latin America's most important essay of the nineteenth century. It is a study of the Argentine character, a prescription for...

Funeral for Flaca is an exploration of things lost and found-love, identity, family-and the traumas that transcend bodies, borders, cultures, and generations.Emilly Prado retraces her experience coming of age as a prep-turned-chola-turned-punk in this collection that is one-part memoir-in-essays, and one-part playlist, zigzagging across...

Omeros is the grand epic poem told in multiple chapters from Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott. With circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, Omeros simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events--the tribal losses...

A dual-language volume of poems on darkness and light--many appearing in English for the first time--by one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century Revered for his magnificent works of fiction, Jorge Luis Borges thought of himself primarily as a poet. Poems of...

Édouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne. When he returned to...

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay My ignorance was on my side. I wasn't afraid. I didn't know what to be afraid of. I did one thing, I did another. I did what I now call crashing about. One...

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth, New Directions is pleased to announce the reissue of a classic work in a timeless translation by Donald D. Walsh and fully bilingual. Residence on Earth is perhaps Neruda's greatest work. Upon its publication...

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024. Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Finalist for the 2025 Zora Awards. Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the...

The growing prominence of afrocentricity has contributed to the increase in black Hispanic literature and the emergence of Afro-Hispanism as a legitimate genre of historical and sociocultural study. From Nicolás Guillén to Manuel Zapata Olivella and Nancy Morejón, Spanish-speaking black writers have been steadily...

This bilingual collection of Neruda's most essential poems is indispensable.Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the U.S., this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda's various styles and themes.An...

When Latin American writers burst onto the world literary scene in the now famous "Boom" of the sixties, it seemed as if an entire literature had invented itself over night out of thin air. Not only was the writing extraordinary but its sudden and...

The complete sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--in English and SpanishThis landmark collection brings together for the first time in any language all of the sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. More intimate and...

A landmark book--the first complete publication of Langston Hughes's translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than...